Coincidence or not?

This weekend my husband had to work, and there was my daughter's dance kickoff show, and there was a blizzard so...I didn't get any runs in this weekend. I did however get a ridiculous amount of shoveling in! I also did a Livestrong.com stronger workout so I wouldn't feel like such a blob. Now, I'm not sure if it was the shoveling (I did try to take it easy) or if it was the lack of running but I had to take the maximum amount of ibuprofen both Saturday and Sunday just to keep from hobbling around in pain. As usual the pain just increased as the days went on and by the evenings I was just trying to sit in a position that didn't make my knee feel like it was compressing in on itself. Frustrating. To top it off I had to spend my one day at home cleaning all day since my husband wants us all to spend next weekend at his parent's house 6 hours away, blah.
The only bright side to going to the in-law's house is the extra time I get to run. No one moves before lunchtime there so I can take my time getting up and going for a run while my daughter watches their tv and my husband sleeps (unless my sister in-law shows up with her kids, then its a three ring circus). Unfortunately after that it's all about visiting other relatives and spending a lot of time just sitting around hearing about their health issues or the latest family gossip.
So, after my experience this past weekend and numerous other occasions like it, I think my knee responds better to running days than non running days. On running days it's pretty rare that I need to take a pill to get through an evening of couch surfing so I guess that's something new to track. Today is a running day, but I also did a Livestrong.com workout (yay me!), so I'll use my Livestrong.com diet app and see if I can find a correlation. If it turns out to be true that running is somehow thwarting my pain I'll make sure I ramp up my frequency to 5 to 6 days a week asap (currently I'm doing a solid 3-4 runs a week). But given what I've been experiencing I'm finally looking up the race calendar for this year and thinking about what races I'll run! So far I want to do the Waskally Wrabbit 27.5km trail race (mid-June), the Brookville 25km trail race (August) and I'm toying with the idea of ramping up for a fall marathon at the Maritime Race weekend (September). We'll see how the next few weeks of training goes!